Search form

Parents Matter, Redux

The idea that
“parents don’t matter”—shorthand for the view that how parents treat
their children has no effect on the kids’ behavior, values,
achievements and other outcomes—just won’t go away. I can hardly
believe it’s been more than 10 years since I wroteabout the controversial claim that only genes and peers shape children;
once parents contribute an egg or sperm, asserted the book The Nurture Assumption (now out in a revised paperback edition), they have no effect on how their kids turn out.

So I was struck by what’s being called “the largest meta-analysis ever conducted on the association between parenting styles and delinquency.” The meta-analysis, in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology,
looked at 161 published and unpublished studies on the question, and
found that how well parents monitored their children, whether they
expressed rejection or hostility, and a number of other factors indeed
had an effect.

What’s
particularly interesting is the size of the effect. An association can
be statistically significant (unlikely to be due to chance) without
being practically significant; that is, there can be true
cause-and-effect, but a tiny effect. Not so in this case. Rewarding
kids for good behavior had an effect size of .11, for instance; not
huge, but not tiny (it means that 11% of the difference between kids’
levels of delinquency is due to whether their parents rewarded them for
good behavior, something that reduces delinquency). Being authoritative
also reduced delinquency, again with an effect size of .11, while being
authoritarian increased delinquency, with an effect size of .12. Put
the two together and being authoritarian (dictatorial, controlling) as
opposed to authoritative (firm, consistent, setting limits, but with
love and kindness) accounts for a swing of .23. Physical punishment and
verbal aggression also were associated with more delinquency.

The “parents
don’t matter” school might argue that little delinquents-to-be bring
out the worst in parents, who turn authoritarian. It is the kids’ innate tendenciesthat cause later delinquency, according to this argument, not how
parents behave. The problem with this claim is the many studies showing
that whether you are an authoritarian or an authoritative parent “is
most often determined before your first kid is even born, and is highly
dependent upon your own experience of discipline . . . and your general
political/personality orientation,” as clinical psychologist Nestor Lopez-Duran wrote.

In the
last 10 years scientists have made significant progress in
understanding the interaction between parenting style and the innate,
genetic predispositions of children. As I wrote last August,
the interaction between genes and environment means that some children
will not respond to particular parenting behaviors the way the
textbooks say. (My favorite examples were breast feeding and learning
from mistakes.) But to extrapolate from that and claim that parents
have no effect on how their kids turn out is simply bizarre.